Postal 2 (PC)
Developed by: Running With Scissors
Published by: Whiptail Interactive

The first thing that came to mind when I first started playing was HOLY CRAP! Actually….. it was more like HOLY SHIT! According to the people at Running with Scissors, violence should be in games rather than real life. I’m not really here to debate this issue, I’m here to tell you if this game is a piece of crap or a good piece of crap.

Hmmm where should I even begin with this one? I’ll give you some adjectives to start off with: Shocking, Disturbing, Violent, Bloody, and now I’m going to hell for playing this.

Postal 2 is a first person shooter that allows you the freedom of playing anyway you like. “To kill, or not to kill? The things you do in the game will have an impact on what will happen later. You play the roll of the postal guy, and you live out a really crappy week in his shoes. You do things like: pick up milk, piss on your father’s grave, get your paycheck, get laundry, get napalm, pick up Christmas tree, go to confession and get Gary Coleman’s autograph. Yes that’s right, child star Gary Coleman stars in this game. You don’t actually play as him but he makes an appearance in the game and does voiceovers and motion capture. “I’m sorry father for I have sinned” But I actually killed him, and everyone in the mall, then set his body on fire with gasoline and pissed on him, while playing soccer with his already severed head. See what I mean now with those adjectives! “That’s what I’m talkin bout foo” Sorry Gary, please forgive me. That’s not even the beginning of it. I’m scared to even say the rest. All I know is that I won’t be setting foot in a church for a while, especial from what I did to people, just because I didn’t want to wait in line.

Depending on your sense of humor and taste, Postal 2 is funny and fun for the first couple of hours. After the jokes ware thin, it seems like your actually forcing your self to play in order to get your money’s worth. It gets pretty damn boring doing the same crap over and over like Walking long distances, killing the same people and having to wait hours for the levels to load up. Giving people Golden showers is always fun at times; sometimes people will even vomit on you when you do it. Eventually it gets stupid and pointless pretty much like this game.

The only way to describe this game over all is it’s the equivalent to the by product of a meal at Taco bell. In other words, “It’s pure shit”. The models in the game are crap, the textures could be better, and the voice acting is so bland. The only thing driving sales is the negative publicity this game has been getting from the press. I bet you want to see for your self now? you sick SOB! I recommend renting it, or pissing on someone to get it, if you really want to know and make sure you keep it away from the kiddey’s.

I give this game a 5 on my ass kick meter. — Chian

The Hours
Directed by: Stephen Daldry
Written by: Michael Cunningham (novel), David Hare (screenplay)
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, John C. Reilly

“…always the years between us, always the years, always the love, always…the hours…”

Based on Michael Cunningham’s highly acclaimed book, The Hours follows the lives of three women from three different time periods. The different story lines are masterfully woven together while all three women are realizing that they have been living their life for someone else.

The story unfolds as a writer, a housewife and a modern woman each live a typical day in their life. One decision made by each woman turns their world in an about face. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), on the brink of insanity, is writing “Mrs. Dalloway” in the 1920s in a suburb of London. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a post WWII housewife in Los Angeles who is reading “Mrs. Dalloway”. Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is unknowingly living the book, “Mrs. Dalloway”, in contemporary New York while she deals with the last days of her former lover Richard (Ed Harris), who is dying of AIDS.

Virginia Woolf struggles with her own mental health as she writes her book. In Los Angeles, Laura Brown tries to find a reason to get through the monotony of another day in her life, even though she seems to have a great deal to live for with a caring husband (John C. Reilly), a young son and a baby soon on the way. Fast forward around fifty years and Clarissa Vaughan, with a daughter (Claire Danes) in college and a former lover dying of AIDS is spending her time planning a party.

Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Hours is a heavy movie which deals with the struggles of life, death and love. The movie is a beautiful commentary on how every day must be cherished and how every decision you make affects someone else. Flowing and poetic, The Hours exposes the lives of three completely different women in different times and places who are connected by their realization that they are living their life for all the wrong reasons. — Alicia

Hot Hot Heat
with The Anniversary, Apollo Sunshine
Friday April 18th, 2003 @ Showplace Theatre, Buffalo

There are good live bands and there are bad live bands, and every now and then there are concerts that showcase both extremes in one night. With that said, let me describe for you the scene that unfolded at the Showplace Theatre on Good Friday of this year.

Hot Hot Heat, who have been selling out shows left and right across North America (and even in England), apparently are a little too wimpy for the “Tuffalo” kids since the show was not sold out and the place was pretty empty when we first arrived. The crowd did pick up later however, and as we would soon find out, the fashionably late showgoers had the right idea all along.

The show opened with a band called Apollo Sunshine, hailing from Massachusetts. They kickstarted things with a lot of energy and some catchy pop songs featuring Beatles/Beach Boys-esque harmonies. They had a standard 3-piece set up with guitar, bass and drums, although the bass player sometimes played keyboard as well (often simultaneously with his bass) and the guitar player sometimes alternated to a slide guitar. They started off strong, but as their set progressed their energy seemed too unfocused and their songs became chaotic. Towards the end, it just started to drag as they went off on too many hippie jams and funk excursions (which ironically would only foreshadow the next band’s performance).

Speaking of which, let’s move on to The Anniversary. I will start by asking the obvious question in many people’s minds: what the hell happened to this band? As much as I can appreciate the fact that they broke out of the emo pigeonhole, now they are just boring and lame. They don’t even look like the same 5 people pictured on the inside of the cd. I’m not one for judging bands by their appearance, but you know something’s gone horribly wrong when 3 of the 4 male members are sporting mustaches, long hair, and buttoned plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Not to mention the fact that the lead singer was wearing an Angus hat and striped pants, and the drummer was actually wearing a rolled up bandana headband. With most bands I would have thought it was a joke, but considering that no one in the band cracked a smile for the entire set, I somehow doubt it.

The band stood around smoking and drinking wine on stage for quite a while to establish their new rock star attitudes, and it seemed like there was more smoke billowing from the stage than from anywhere else in the building. Still, I thought maybe things would be alright once they finally strapped on their guitars. Nope. They just looked like they could care less up there; the singing was like an obligation that they didn’t want to bother with, and they each seemed to be off in their own world, playing their instruments without any cohesiveness or chemistry. Not only that but it was like they were having a contest to see who could play their instruments louder and more annoying. The sound guy should take part of the blame for this, as the keyboards in particular completely overpowered the other instruments, but in reality there was much more evil at work than merely a careless sound guy.

I didn’t hate the most recent Anniversary album, “Your Majesty”, but the songs sounded a hundred times worse live. One of my favourite songs from the album, Devil On My Side, was completely stripped of its energy and barely recognizable. Many of the songs were ruined by adding annoying new keyboard sounds, overindulgent guitar soloing, and aimless extended jams. The Anniversary complimented these lacklustre performances with some pretentious new material, such as the touching ballad, “Jesus Came To L.A.” During each song the lead singer/guitarist would tuck his lit cigarette into the strings in the neck of his guitar because it was obviously too much hassle for him to find an ashtray, or to wait for the end of the set to light up another smoke.

The final song seemed to go on forever with another lengthy prog rock improvisation, and just as I was about to nod off, lo and behond, they jumped into one of their old songs (the only one of the night). It was a slowed-down psyched-out version of D In Detroit, and it sounded like they were sabotaging it on purpose. The real capper on the performance was when the lead singer/guitarist used a bottle of Jack Daniels to perform a slide guitar solo before taking a long swig of it. It doesn’t get much more lame and contrived than that.

Thankfully, Hot Hot Heat saved the night from The Anniversary’s mean spirited stage presence. As soon as they took the stage and started into “Touch You Touch You”, it was like a dark cloud had been lifted from the club. They provided near perfect reproductions of songs from both their Knock Knock Knock EP and Make Up The Breakdown with genuine intensity and rhythmic precision, which got the crowd moving.

The lead singer twitched and pranced around stage delivering lyrics in his distinctive shrill voice, occasionally stopping to pound out some notes on his keyboard. The guitarist and bassist stabbed at their guitars with ferocity while ex-d.b.s. drummer Paul Hawley belted his drum kit with power reminscent of The Jam’s Rick Buckler.

Although they are also showing signs of mellowing out a little, they still rocked the joint fully and completely, and sealed their reptutation as a great live band. Hot Hot Heat are yet another example of where the U.S. might want to stop and take a few pointers from Canada — that is, if they could pull themselves away from all those wars they’ve been starting lately. Perhaps that explains what this whole hippie revival is all about, because I sure don’t see any other good justification for playing boring, pretentious music. — Sean

Reggie And The Full Effect - Under The Tray
(Vagrant)

Seriousness and pretention can ruin a band for me, even if the music itself isn’t half bad. How can one be expected to relate to an artist that is completely self-absorbed and out of touch with reality? On the other side of the coin, while “joke bands” can often do a great job of cutting rock stars down to size, their cheesy gimmicks and focus on humour can prove irritating after a while if they aren’t at least backed up with solid songwriting.

Get Up Kids keyboardist James Dewees has been rocking out with his tongue-in-cheek side project for a few years now, fronting a band known as Reggie and The Full Effect where yes, Dewees does indeed play the role of both Reggie AND the entire Full Effect. While few people can truly say they comprehend all of the inside jokes embedded within his songs, it’s hard to deny the infectiousness of the Weezer-esque rock riffs, sugar-coated vocals and quirky synthesizer noises they contain. The “Greatest Hits 84-87″ and “Promotional Copy” albums have quickly become universal classics for many indie rock kids, which set the bar rather high for Reggie’s next recording.

However, on his third full-length album, Under The Tray, Reggie has failed to impress me. Maybe it was all the hard time he recently spent in prison or maybe he just hasn’t been eating enough chili dogs lately, but for whatever reason he has become a victim of a classic pitfall: too much talk, not enough rock.

The main complaint people have about other Reggie and the Full Effect albums is that all of the eclectic sound clips and short joke songs ruin the flow of the real music. The ratio of real songs to jokes on this album is even lower than usual (less than half) and on top of this, very few of the real songs are actually good.

Many of the songs feature more fictional bands created by Dewees, such as Hungary Bear (some sort of death metal spoof), and Fluxuation (an 80’s synth-pop/New Order dig). The problem with the joke songs this time around is that many of them are 3 or 4 minutes in length, to the point where they are too long to be jokes anymore. Sure the song titles are cute and all, but in this regard Under The Tray works at about the same level as a Weird Al record. Do I need to hear these songs more than once in my life? Probably not.

Also interspersed throughout the tracks are snippets of a drunk girl from a Get Up Kids show rambling about various topics. It’s hard to hear what’s being said, and it’s not actually that funny (maybe you had to be there?). I kind of feel bad for the girl who is being mocked, to tell you the truth.

The only worthwhile moments on the album are the first 2 songs, “Your Bleedin Heart” and “Congratulations Smack & Katy”. Some of the other supposedly “serious” songs like “Image Is Nothing, Lobsters Are Everything” and “Megan 2k2 (Even Though It’s 2k3 Now)” find Dewees delivering cheesy ballads that are ironically close to his own spoofs, using electronic drums and bad vocoder effects. Go figure.

While humour has its place in rock music, there’s also a fine line between being witty and making an ass of yourself. While Reggie & The Full Effect have in the past managed to walk that line, this time around the joke is on them unfortunately. And personally I blame Reggie’s prison inmate Paco. — Sean

The Caribbean - History’s First Know-It-All
(Endearing)

When you think of Caribbean music, what do you hear? Steel drums? Reggae? Easy-listening smooth jazz? Well, as far as the band The Caribbean is concerned, none of these apply — but for a band hailing from the Washington, D.C. area, they’ve done a pretty good job of creating a soundtrack for lazy summer days of shimmering sun and tropical heat.

History’s First Know-It-All is a bit of an unexpected release for Endearing Records, a label that I knew, up until now, mainly for straightforward Canadian indie pop bands like The Bonaduces and The Salteens. Perhaps I simply didn’t know the label as well as I thought I did.

This is the second full length record from The Caribbean, and it is mostly a laidback affair consisting of a mixture of acoustic guitar and waves of reverb, piano, and subtle drums and bass. Sometimes the songs are completely instrumental and other times decorated with soft, murmured vocals, but always dreamy and relaxing. Occasionally they mix in samples of birds chirping and other found sounds, along with synthesizers, harmonica, and various other instruments. This assortment of audio tools may make it seem like The Caribbean are very experimental, but the end product here is nothing overly challenging or confrontational… just a nice collection of warm, lo-fi pop tunes.

A few of the songs stand out above the others, simply because they are more upbeat and feature more prominent vocal hooks; in particular “It’s Unlikely To Settle The Difference”, a haunting brit-pop influenced sing along, and “Annunciator Zone”, an indie rock number that meets somewhere between the sound of Eric’s Trip and Pavement.

The band members assemble most of their songs by sharing bits and pieces of audio recordings via e-mail and a process of long distance collaboration. This explains the scrapbook feel to this album, with each song resembling a montage of sound and melody. For all of the record’s beauty however, it is also a tad on the boring side. It makes ideal background music when relaxation is the goal, but it doesn’t offer up quite enough substance to keep an active listener engaged for the entire duration. — Sean

Dreamcatcher
Directed by: Lawrence Kasdan
Written by: William Goldman, Lawrence Kasdan, Stephen King (novel)
Starring: Morgan Freeman, Jason Lee, Tom Sizemore, Donnie Wahlberg

Today I watched Dreamcatcher in the movies. It was hard to know what happens in Dreamcatcher because of unsure writing between William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan (Empire Strikes Back! Space battle opera!) Stephen King written novel is the movie based on Dreamcatcher, by Mr.King.

Jason Lee and more is friends with the psychic power to be in the minds of the other people. As children, they save a retard from the bullies, and the retard gives Jason Lee and other as children powers to be in the minds of the other people. The friends go to the cabin and talk about themselves as children and the retard they saved from the bully. A weird woodsman gets picked up and brought to the cabin and has gas and an alien in his belly. From where? Out of nowhere from the children story? I don’t know. Where is it going?

Aliens are attacking! Morgan Freeman is crazy and tries to kill aliens but is too crazy that he kills his mind. Tom Sizemore is crazy not as much! After Jason Lee and two other friends are in trouble with aliens, Freeman and Sizemore try and help to make the aliens stop the bad movie I wish! Where is the aliens from? Looks like a big headed fish! I don’t know.

Bad writing leading in a direction with the aliens over the children story. Where did it go? I thought it starts with the good stuff and the cabin with good snow in the movie, but where did it go? I don’t know. — Reviewed by Chi Chi from Korea

Phone Booth
Directed by: Joel Schumacher
Written by: Larry Cohen
Starring: Colin Farrell, Forest Whitaker, Katie Holmes

Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth is based on a mediocre concept, vaguely familiar from movies like Speed, but uses a smart script and interesting execution to create an above average movie. You may have heard about the movie a while back, as its release was delayed due to the sniper shootings in DC. Perhaps they were hoping this would give the movie some additional publicity, although it is debatable whether or not the extra wait built any sort of hype (not to mention, whether or not it was actually worth the wait).

Quick rising Aussie superstar Colin Farrell plays a sleazy PR Rep named Stu Shepard who is cheating on his wife. Well, actually that’s not entirely true, he’s only flirting with other women. Little does he know, there is a self-righteous stalker who has been following him for weeks, watching him live his shallow life of lies and broken promises, disapproving of his flaws. When Farrell uses a pay phone in Manhattan (the only remaining pay phone of its kind in the city, so we’re told) to place his daily call to a young pretty actress (Katie Holmes), the stalker puts a plan into action that will teach this horrible miscreant a lesson. He calls the pay phone just after Stu hangs up, who of course is powerless to resist answering it. He then proceeds to hold Stu at gun point from an unknown location, in attempt to force him to repent for his wrongdoings.

Right off the bat, it seems a little unreasonable that the sniper has targeted Stu as someone who needs punishment. This is not to say that snipers have to be reasonable, but as the movie progresses we see that he’s really thought the whole thing out beforehand, and it seems like an effort that might be better spent on someone more deserving. Stu may not be the most upstanding citizen, but he certainly hasn’t done anything morally worse than the pimp and prostitutes hanging out on the same street, for example. Once Stu has answered the phone, however, and finds himself stuck in this life-threatening, seemingly unescapable situation, we also get pulled in and forget about the “hows” and “whys”… the only question in our mind is, “What will happen next?”

One of the interesting things about Phone Booth is the fact that it all basically takes place in a single location. In some ways this reminds me of David Fincher’s Panic Room, as it is a movie that relies on a good story and some cool visual effects to prevent you from losing interest. For example, Joel Schumacher uses some split screen windows to bring several simultaneous points of view into the picture, and some cool handheld footage to give the gritty street feel. And although the story defies logic at times, it does provide enough twists to keep things moving. The singular location is also useful because it creates a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere, again similar to Panic Room.

Colin Farrell does a reasonable job as the charismatic PR type, and performs well under stress, unfortunately he does stumble a little when the movie requires some real raw emotion out of him. The voice of the sniper was provided by Keifer Sutherland, and although his sarcastic dialogue is one of the most fun parts of the movie, at times it seems a little too overdone… almost like the truck driver from Joy Ride. However, this shouldn’t be a huge surprise considering that writer Larry Cohen was responsible for some classic b-movie cheese including The Stuff and Uncle Sam. Forrest Whittaker also deserves mention for his sympathetic performance as the police officer trying to gingerly coax Stu out of the phone booth, despite being in the dark about the situation.

Phone Booth does seem a little preachy with its ideals, but at least it gives the movie some substance — I much prefer this to some crazed, mindless serial killer plot. Considering that the sniper is just a voice that only Stu can hear, he could actually be interpreted as a representation of Stu’s conscience to some extent.

Overall, the movie is a fun little diversion that has its share of weaknesses, but also its share of cool moments too, whether they be humourous, suspenseful, or just visually impressive. Don’t go see it if you’re only going to try and pick it apart (because you’ll definitely have a field day with it), but if you take it with a grain of salt, it ain’t half bad. In the end I enjoyed the movie for what it was, and yet I don’t think it will deter me from using a phone booth anytime in the near future. — Sean